Five minutes of breathing exercise keeps the doctor away.
Walking for 30 minutes or keeping ourselves busy with gardening is one of the best ways to stay healthy. Our hectic life doesn’t allow us to work out regularly, but a new study confirms that 5-minute breathing exercises, six days a week, help lower blood pressure and boost heart health.
65% of adults whose age is 50 or above have normal blood pressure in the United States that leads to the risk of heart attack and stroke. Only less than 40% of people follow aerobic exercise guidelines from the CDC.
5 Minute Breathing Exercises Can Lower Blood Pressure
According to the research team, working out for five minutes regularly is called “strength training for your breathing muscles.” It also improves your vascular health and lowers the chances of developing critical cardiovascular disease, according to the new CU Boulder study.
The research was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association on June 29, 2021, proves that high resistance inspiratory muscle strength training (IMST) helps ward off the biggest killers in the United States.
MST was first introduced in the 1980s to help people who had severe respiratory disease. The treatment involves inhaling through a handheld tool that gives resistance. The researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder discovered that five-minute breathing exercises could improve heart health which is equal to aerobic exercise.
The lead author Daniel Craighead, Ph.D., stated that several strategies can help people maintain cardiovascular health as people age. But these strategies will take a lot of time and effort and can be costly for some people to afford or access. IMST is considered an easy workout method. People can practice for five minutes while watching Television. In this study, 37 high blood pressure adults between the ages of 50 and 79 years participated. Half of them were provided high-resistance IMST for 5 minutes for six days a week. The rest had a low-resistance placebo program. After 6 weeks, the participants saw their systolic blood pressure and the top number decreased by nine points on average. The study team found that this method can be compared with the effects of walking for 30 minutes and pressure medication, 5 days each week. Researchers observed that the IMST group experienced a 45 percent improvement in vascular endothelial function. Participants also experienced less oxidative stress and inflammation which are dangerous factors for heart attacks. The senior author Doug Seals, Ph.D., stated that they have discovered a novel form of treatment that can lower the risk of blood pressure without providing people with pharmacological compounds. This method has extremely higher effectiveness than exercise like aerobics.
If people are considering IMST, they should consult with their physician first. But according to the study team, IMST is a proven technique that showed remarkable results.
